[rescue] Perverse Question

[Dave McGuire]

On Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 08:13 PM, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez 
wrote:
>> - Finally, it might be that Intel has an instruction that helps that 
>> sparcs
>> don't.
>>
>> So I reacted: pentium mmx and higher have an instruction that helps: 
>> mmx.
>
> Theoretically UltraSparc and newer (most V9 machines) have some sort of
> multimedia instructions named VIS, they are actually pretty good and 
> you
> can access them through a nifty library set provided by SUN. Of course
> that means that you are using Solaris and probably sun's CC....

   The library is called MediaLib.  You don't need Sun's compiler to use 
it; I've used it with gcc.  VIS is an instruction set extension, not a 
part of SPARC v9, but as far as I'm aware all v9 SPARCs from Sun 
implement it.  It's "safe" to use in that regard.  I've used it with 
great success on some image processing projects...VIS works very well.  
Zoom!

   I've since dumped gcc with extreme prejudice on all my Ultras, 
though...Sun's compiler is SO MUCH BETTER it's just ridiculous.  
Seriously.  Just FYI. ;)

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "I've grown hair again, just
St. Petersburg, FL           for the occasion."       -Doc Shipley